Peter Hendy's relief is palpable: with hours to go before this week’s planned Tube strike, the TSSA and RMT unions have suspended their action.

“This represents a profound victory for common sense on all sides,” says Hendy, London’s Transport Commissioner since 2006. “We’re delighted we can sit down and discuss every aspect of the proposals on a station-by-station basis.”

“I’m relieved for our passengers,” he says. His relief reflects the grimness of last week’s 48-hour strike, in appalling weather and with traffic gridlock across central London.

“It was bloody hard for people,” admits Hendy, 60, who donned a hi-vis jacket and went out to see the chaos for himself. But although commuters recognised him, he says: “People don’t walk up to you and say, ‘You’re a useless bastard, you’ve caused these people to go on strike’.” Instead, he says, they were grateful for there being at least some Tubes.

At issue are TfL’s ambitious plans to close all remaining Tube ticket offices, with a loss of more than 950 posts, and move remaining staff out onto platforms and concourses. Those losses will be balanced by 200 jobs created by 24-hour Tubes running on some lines on Fridays and Saturdays from 2015.

TfL has promised there will be no compulsory redundancies: everyone who wants to continue working can — “an astonishing proposition,” says Hendy. More than 1,000 staff have asked for a quote for the severance package they would get; more than 500 have expressed a “strong interest” in going. He insists all the details are up for discussion: TfL has offered a four-month consultation period.

None of this has prevented a bitter confrontation. The RMT’s general secretary Bob Crow says that — prior to the past week’s talks at the conciliation service Acas, at least — TfL had refused to talk to the unions. “That is completely untrue,” says Hendy, who maintains that the unions failed to turn up to various meetings. “Plain wrong,” counters a union spokesman. Last week the dispute deteriorated into a clash on live radio between the Mayor and Crow, who called in. Hendy shows irritation with the way the issues have got lost in “all of the noise based on personalities”.

But it was probably always heading that way. TfL announced its plans on November 21; the next day London Underground sent the unions an HR1 form, a legal obligation, warning of 953 redundancies. The RMT began balloting for strike action four days later. On January 10, it announced a vote in favour of the strike; the white-collar TSSA union later voted to join it. Low turnout meant that only 30 per cent or fewer of those balloted in both unions voted in favour.

This, it seems, is in part due to a sense of resignation about the changes. Staff were well aware that radical change was on the way long before TfL set out its latest plans. In autumn 2010, 800 ticket-office posts went via voluntary redundancy, despite four 24-hour strikes. (As for Boris Johnson’s 2008 pledge not to close ticket offices, repeated in March 2010, “He has to account for what he says at elections but he didn’t say it in 2012,” observes Hendy.)

He adds: “The world has changed since 2008. There are 60 million Oyster cards in circulation now.” In the run-up to the 2012 Olympics, London Underground managing director Mike Brown held well over 100 group meetings with staff to discuss the network’s preparations for the Games and beyond.

“One of things he said was that the traditional ticket office didn’t have a future,” says Hendy. Since then there have been ongoing discussions with staff. The two main points Hendy takes from these are complaints that the management structure is too complex — station supervisors will bear the brunt of redundancies — and that staff enjoy more interaction with customers.

But TfL has to win over not only its staff but its users. One poll last week found that almost two-thirds of the public were concerned about ticket office closures. TfL’s challenge for passengers is to make all transactions possible at machines.

“They will be able to do that in the future,” Hendy promises, with 150 new machines and others modified. He envisages members of staff being on concourses to help people with transactions.

He also rejects the unions’ suggestion that the cuts will affect safety. Since 800 ticket-office jobs were lost in 2010, crime on the network has fallen. TfL has promised there will continue to be a visible staff presence on all stations.

“Most people assume that the station is controlled by somebody in the office,” says Hendy. “It’s not.” Even ticket barriers can be centrally controlled. Images from most of the network’s CCTV cameras can now be viewed on an iPad, along with a feed of up-to-date train information. Roving staff — and central controllers — will be able to stay in control of these things. Hendy also promises that help for disabled passengers will continue, and that tourists will get a better deal.

It is hard not to conclude that in the end this dispute comes down to a power struggle over management’s right to implement change. That struggle is regularly inconveniencing Londoners: last week’s was the 25th strike on the Tube since Johnson took power less than six years ago (his predecessor, Ken Livingstone, did better, with 16 strikes in eight years).

Yet Hendy appears to have little time for the Mayor’s preferred long-term solution of a change in union laws: “We manage this place in the political and legal world we’re in. I’ve heard lots of people over the years talking about trade union law reform and I’ve seen nobody ever doing it.” Likewise the no-strike agreement which Johnson’s manifesto pledged in 2008: “As management, I can’t see that it’s practical.”

Still, Hendy wants change. He started his career as a London Transport graduate trainee in 1975. “I look back on some of the people I worked with when I joined 38 years ago and sometimes I think they bottled it — they looked at the future and thought, ‘Oh God, that looks too difficult’. We can’t do that now.”

Today’s letter from London Underground to the unions agrees to discussions on all aspects of the plans, including ticket office closures — though it is hard to see TfL agreeing to any real reversal on the latter.

“We are prepared to have the most detailed discussions about what these proposals mean,” he says. “What we’re not willing to do is withdraw all the proposals and have a vague discussion about how we can save money, because we are supposed to run this place.” That last point especially may yet prove hard for Bob Crow to stomach.